Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 36

The US Invaded Iraq Because It Wouldn’t Have Survived Otherwise

United States: While the US invasion of Iraq about a decade ago was based on public-facing lies about nonexistent weapons arsenals, the underlying reasons for the invasion were much more dire. Iraq had found the US’ Achilles Heel, and would bankrupt the US if not stopped.

When the United States President “Not-a-Crook” Nixon unilaterally declared that the United States would not pay back its loans on August 15, 1971, it sent shockwaves through the financial world. Normally, this would have been a declaration of bankruptcy. Instead, the world seemed to accept Nixon’s statement that the rest of the world could trade their unfulfilled financial claims on the US between them as they pleased, and maybe hope to recover some of it.

This set off the greatest experiment in global economics ever conducted. Some claim that our economy is based on centuries-old principles dating back to the 1600s; that’s factually wrong. The principles under which the global economy operates are merely 40 years old – half of a human lifetime – and there are increasing signs of ponzification, which, if bursting, would be a bubble-burst the likes of which has never been seen.

Before this so-called Nixon Shock, the US Dollar was based on gold. Every U.S. Dollar was an IOU issued by the United States, redeemable for one-thirty-fifth of an ounce of gold at any time.

Regrettably, the war devastated the US Economy. The Vietnam war, that is. As a result, the US did the predictable and stupid thing and just started printing more money to finance the war. Before the war, coverage for this debt had been reasonable, but some countries – France, in particular – saw where things were heading. Charles de Gaulle insisted on having the French USD reserves redeemed for gold, as had been promised. This exchange also took place, causing the back-end gold coverage for the dollar to drop from about 50% to about 20%, past the economic breaking point.

Seeing that the US couldn’t possibly pay back its issued IOUs as promised, Nixon decided to… not do that, and just cancelled their validity unilaterally, as has already been stated. This had a number of effects: first, it caused currencies to start floating against each other, rather than all being tied to the dollar which was in turn tied to gold. Second, it allowed the US to start printing dollars like there was no tomorrow, and encouraging other countries to buy as much as they could, to just stockpile US Dollars.

This also happened, and is known as currency reserves. The USD, being the world’s dominant currency, holds two immense advantages of being held in currency reserves: first, each dollar bought and stockpiled in a non-US country is one dollar that gave the US citizens (or government) that purchasing power against other nations for free. (If I print money for fun that you buy with your money, I can use your money to buy your shiny things.) The second is the status of being the world’s international trade currency, meaning that if I want to buy something from you in China, I need to first buy US Dollars with my money, and then exchange those US Dollars for your goods that I want.

These two mechanisms create an external demand for the US Dollar that props up the United States’ grotesque overconsumption and feeds its ridiculously oversized military. (How grotesque is the overconsumption, you ask? The US federal deficit is 50%. For every two dollars the US Government spends, one of them needs to be borrowed from somewhere.) This deficit is absorbed by countries that stockpile an increasing number of US Dollars in their currency reserves, predominantly in east Asia. This group of countries has been derogatorily called ODIC, Organization of Dollar-Importing Countries.

We observe here, that if another currency should begin to threaten the dominance of the USD in key international trade, the currency reserves would be rebalanced to reflect that fact. It would not merely cause less US overconsumption to be absorbed – rebalancing currency reserves would mean that countries started selling USD instead of just not buying, replacing a portion of their USD holdings with something else. Seeing how precarious the US financial situation is, this could well set off a selloff avalanche that would re-balance the USD down to a fraction of today’s value. In economic terms, this is called a “correction”. (I’ve written a previous piece on this that’s easy to read.) Such an avalanche would be the definite end of the United States as a superpower and largely mirror the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was similarly overextended. It would also bring a lot of suffering to the already-overexploited middle and lower economic classes in the US.

So, back to Iraq and the United States invasion. What could Iraq possibly have done from the other side of the planet that warranted a global campaign of lies to build political support for a military invasion that still kills people, one decade later? Why was it rational for the US Administration to spend one trillion or so dollars – more accurately described as “a shitload of money” – on going to war with a small country on the other side of the planet, one that had nothing at all to do with the September 11 attacks? On observing the facts on the table, it was perfectly rational to do so, all the deaths and suffering notwithstanding. It was likely a matter of life and death for the US as a nation:

Iraq had suddenly started selling its oil for Euros instead of for US Dollars.

The United States invaded three years later, which was about the necessary time to build public global opinion (based on false pretexts, also technically known as “lies”, about weapons stockpiles) for a full-scale ground invasion. It also had considerable help from the lack of nuance following the September 11 attacks in 2001 in pushing aggression against a country that was unrelated to those attacks.

Predictably, after the invasion was over, one of the very first actions taken by the interim US-led administration was to revert to selling oil in US Dollars instead, closing the circle and ending the imminent threat to the United States’ existence as a superpower.

Obviously, it could be asked why I’m bringing this up now. I’ll be following up with articles related to this topic – but it has to do with bitcoin, the yuan, Iran and its similar position, and the overall global financial crisis bubble. Hint: Iran is already selling oil in yuan and is moving ahead with a Euro-based stock exchange in Tehran.

Telegraph: “Iran Presses Ahead With Dollar Attack”

Prudent Investor: “Iranian Oil Bourse Could Kill The US Dollar”

And again, the US beats the drums of war. Very predictable.

“Plurality”: An Amazing Short Film About Surveillance In 2023

Privacy: I usually don’t watch video. The format bores me. But I found this short film about the current developments amazing.

Normally, when I start watching a feature film, I skip past the intro. Then, I watch for a minute or two before I get impatient and start skipping all over the movie, trying to get a feel for what it’s about. After some 30 seconds or so of this activity, I give up and go to Wikipedia to read the plot line instead. Sometimes, I go back to the movie afterwards.

In other words, I have absolutely no patience for the video format, where I can’t evaluate if something is interesting and relevant before having seen all of it in real time. I feel it’s disrespectful of my time and attention to take away my possibility of gradually evaluating if something deserves more attention, as I can do with anything in text format.

This short film, however, had me absorbed from the get-go. When it was over, it felt like 30 seconds had passed. That in itself is remarkable – but the short film also communicates a very chilling insight into where we’re going. The movie is about ever-increasing surveillance, and how it always ends up where we don’t want it – with quite a few surprises baked in.

In the movie, DNA scanners are everywhere, and links your DNA with centralized access control lists to everything. Predictably, it started out as a convenience, until legislation stipulated that law enforcement can and shall have access to all of it. The plot twists towards the end are gripping.

Watch it here. Or don’t. Watch it in fullscreen HD on YouTube. There’s also a Facebook page for discussing directly with the film’s crew, including the director Dennis Liu.

And on a meta-level, this really shows how you can be successful without a traditional movie studio. It was filmed on consumer-level equipment; Canon 5D and 7D.

(Via Hax, via Lake, both in Swedish.)

Back From Keynote In Aarhus, DK

Evangelism: I just came back from Denmark, where I gave the opening keynote at GOTO Conference in Aarhus. I spoke for almost an hour about the importance of letting old and obsolete industries die in peace.

The topic of my talk was “Beware red flags on the Net”, referring to the Red Flag Act of 1865 in the United Kingdom. It stipulated that every car must have a man walking in front of the car waving a red flag, thereby effectively limiting the new automobile to walking speed. Much later, it was discovered that the railroad and stagecoach industries had been behind the lobbying that led to this law – they pretended to embrace the new technology, but actually killed its potential to disrupt their own business.

As a result, the German automobile industry got a 20-year head start over the British one, a head start that still shows in the global economy. Thus, the special interest of the legacy industries prevented the public interest of a competitive overall industry.

I gave many more examples of this, and point out that the legacy information industries are now doing the same thing to the net – pretending in words to embrace it, but their actions are different: they are trying to kill the net’s ability to replace the legacy industries with something better. Towards the end, I peered a bit in my crystal ball and predicted that telcos, banks, and even entire governments are next in line to be challenged after the postal services, the copyright industry, and the news services have started to sweat over becoming obsolete (and in the case of the postal service, the process is almost complete).

GOTO at Aarhus was my first opening keynote this month – on the 25th, I’m also honored with opening T2 Infosec in Helsinki. (I’m also giving the closing keynote at NodeJS Dublin on the 19th and a few other presentations in October.)

I was very happy to see the evaluation results come in from the audience: despite logistic problems with the audio, the results came back as 288 votes positive, 56 neutral and only 10 negative. Doing the math, I think that translates to a 97% approval rating, which would be pretty much as good as it gets. I also enjoyed the reactions come in on Twitter – thanks, all:

A politician opening #gotoaar? Wonder if we’ll ever see a Danish politician with that kind of technical background. /cc @falkvinge

— Kristian Langborg-Ha (@klangborg) oktober 1, 2012

(Two microphones broke down in sequence, and I decided to not have the audience wait. This was the opening keynote, after all. Instead, I used the voice capacities from my officer’s training – you just talk calmly but really loud, and it doesn’t come across as screaming at all.)

Pretty good acoustics in the main #gotoaar auditorium despite the lack of a working mic – well done @falkvinge for carrying despite it all

— Sam Newman (@samnewman) oktober 1, 2012

@falkvinge is able to be heard at the back of a large room without a microphone. awesome. #gotoaar

— Linda van der Pal (@DuchessFounder) oktober 1, 2012

(After a few minutes, I was equipped with a new mic.)

Great keynote at #gotoaar @falkvinge is a great entertainer with our without a micro ;)

— Sven Peters (@svenpet) oktober 1, 2012

@falkvinge is delivering a good and entertaining opening keynote at the Goto conference! #gotoaar

— Anders Rosen (@MrInlumino) oktober 1, 2012

Really great points made by @falkvingeat #gotoaar

— Mogens Heller Grabe (@mookid8000) oktober 1, 2012

#gotoaar interesting talk by @falkvinge about politics in combination with the fast changing world around us.

— Harco Dijkstra (@dimban74) oktober 1, 2012

The Pirate Party’s @falkvinge makes a compelling case that our children should have the same rights as our parents #gotoaar

— Jez Humble (@jezhumble) oktober 1, 2012

Awesome talk by @falkvinge by but is the infinite storage for your email really free? what about privacy? #gotoaar

— Simon Skov Boisen (@ssboisen) oktober 1, 2012

Listening to the keynote by @falkvinge about tech laws and disruption at #GOTOaar. Danish political leaders should listen to him. #dkpol

— Therese Hansen (@qedtherese) oktober 1, 2012

Surprising and inspiring speech from @falkvinge on rights. Normally I hate rants about rights but I can not agree to the opposite #gotoaar

— Frank Vilhelmsen (@frankvilhelmsen) oktober 1, 2012

@falkvinge gave brilliant talk on red flag maneuvers at #gotoaar – obsolete industries should be allowed to die in peace

— Torben Hoffmann (@LeHoff) oktober 1, 2012

“Incumbents don’t ignore new tech – they try to kill it” @falkvinge #gotoaar

— Josh Graham (@delitescere) oktober 1, 2012

(Also, for marketing purposes, I love presenting in places like Aarhus. It’s a silly but very effective soundbite to say that you’ve given presentations in places from Aarhus to Zurich.)

Photo by Malene Rauhe.

Swedish Pirate Party Surges After File-Sharing Host Facility Raided

Activism: Following a police raid on the hosting facility PRQ that coincided with technical problems at the iconic The Pirate Bay, the Swedish Pirate Party is surging in member and activist count.

The day before yesterday, the colocation facility PRQ was raided, as reported by TorrentFreak and others. PRQ is known for hosting those who fight for freedom of expression to a level where it can get commercially inconvenient, but still is very protected by the principles of freedom of speech. PRQ hosts a number of smaller, indie torrent search indexes that are still quite large in their own right – though nowhere as large as The Pirate Bay, which had simultaneous downtime.

The arguably largest of the indie search indexes, tankafetast.com, decided to redirect their entire domain to the Swedish Pirate Party’s Facebook page in protest against the raid. The result tells everyone and anyone that file-sharing is very, very far from gone and replaced with Spotify-style streaming. It also gives a very interesting insight into demographics.

Being nerds and geeks at heart, pirates love numbers and visualizations. Therefore, the Swedish Pirate Party presents a lot of real-time data regarding its membership statistics (in comparison with other parties, that only state their member count at end-of-year – and take until March or so to compute it).

We observe, that while the Swedish PP has been hovering at about 7,600 members for the past year, it has now received 1,000 new members in 24 hours:

The X-axis here is the date of month, so the chart stretches from September 3 to October 3, but plots are realtime as those days progress – you can see how the member count takes off and goes vertical on October 2, slows down slightly as the Swedish night approaches, then takes off again in the morning of October 3 (rightmost part of the graph). Based on the visual appearance of these graphs, surge events like this are fondly referred to as verticalities – it looks like the chart pilot just pulled the stick all the way backward and went vertical on afterburner.

The Facebook page itself also has a ton of new likes and subscribers, obviously, and posts there are getting shared far and wide – getting the kind of visibility an article on this blog doesn’t get even if it tops Reddit’s front page for a full day. The numbers are going nuclear, as is typical for a verticality.

Events like this have happened twice before, and although they were far more pronounced, they exhibited the same general signs. Those times, the membership count tripled in a week: the first time from 2,200 to 6,600, and the second time from 14,000 to 42,000. The first verticality was at the raid on The Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006, and the second was at the District Court’s verdict against the accused operators of The Pirate Bay on April 17, 2009.

(Following that, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European Elections on June 7, 2009, and two out of Sweden’s 20 seats – as predicted when founding the party, we were capable of 225k votes, and therefore, seats.)

But this recent data also tells us a lot about demographics. The copyright industry has long claimed that the people who are sharing knowledge and culture today are those who learned to share when they were teenagers, that these people are now in their late 30s or early 40s, and that teenagers today are not a “problem” in this regard. Hard data tells us that this claim is anything but the truth, as we observe the people who arrived at the Pirate Party and chose to sign up:

The X-axis is year of birth, upward bars are new recruitments, downward are members who drop out. We see here that while the recruitment of people born in the 1970s may be significant in absolute numbers, the habit and culture of sharing – as well as the will to defend it – only increases the younger people get, and increases sharply at that. The new recruitment peaks with those born in 1996. This birth year is no coincidence for a political party, actually: they’re completely aware that they’ll be 18 and voting in the next Swedish elections in 2014. (Those who are so young they can’t vote until the 2018 elections typically don’t sign up for a political party just yet, but it’s observable from the Facebook page statistics that the next four-year-wave of activists eclipse even the current round of first-time-voters.)

We can also observe that sharing of culture and knowledge continues to be a male-dominated activity, even though this has started to slowly even out.

So, the conclusions from this news event are, that when people’s ability to share culture and knowledge is actually prevented (rather than just talking about it from a political ivory tower), those people go political – and fast. We can also observe that there is no sign whatsoever of the younger people having different habits of sharing than the first wave of sharers who are now in their 40s – to the contrary, the phenomenon of sharing (and the will to fight for it) only keeps growing.

And just as this article gets published, The Pirate Bay has returned on line.

Swedish Cabinet Can Now Give Assange Anti-Extradition Guarantees. Why Don’t They?

Process of Law – Henrik Alexandersson: When it comes to the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the heels of prestige have dug shoulder-deep trenches. The Brits have agreed to extradite him, in accordance with the European Arrest Warrant. Ecuador has granted him political asylum – and since then, he’s stuck on their embassy in London, without being able to leave the building.

Assange fears that Sweden will extradite him onward to the United States if he’s sent to Sweden. And he may have good reasons to fear the administration of the United States, after having unveiled quite a lot of things that the Americans would rather have kept secret.

It can be argued that the risk of being sent to the US is just as large in the UK as in Sweden, maybe even larger. But let’s focus on Sweden: here, the prosecution of Assange remains a politically infected wound.

The Swedish Administration contends that it neither can nor may give any guarantees against further extradition. The reason for this position is that politicians in the executive branch of government are not allowed to interfere with individual court cases in the judicial branch of government – which is an extraordinarily wise principle.

However, we need to ask ourselves whether this principle is relevant in this particular case. It was recently discovered that the United States Government (or at least the US Military) regards Julian Assange as an “enemy of the state”. And if he can be branded an enemy combatant (even if only armed with his freedom of speech), then it is obvious that he risks torture and maybe even the death penalty if extradited to the United States.

Since Sweden is under formal obligation to not send anybody to a country where they risk torture or capital punishment, with these new facts in hand, there is a perfectly bureaucratically correct and legally untouchable possibility for Sweden to give Julian Assange unambiguous guarantees against further extradition to the United States.

So what’s preventing it from happening?

One possible reason could be that Sweden actually wants to send Assange to the US. But that doesn’t appear very plausible. Besides, Sweden would be violating the international conventions mentioned above. It’s also quite certain that the Administration understands what a Shitstorm From Hell they’d unleash if they even considered putting Assange on a CIA Rendition Airlines flight at Stockholm-Bromma Airport.

More likely, this is about political prestige. The Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has had a media war with Assange about the credibility of the Swedish justice system – and Reinfeldt can be one heck of a grumpy old man. To him, Assange is an enemy. Therefore, the problem arguably lies with the mindset of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister.

If Reinfeldt wants to prove himself to be the elder statesman he so intensely desires to appear as, he should let go of the prestige, take the symbolic political losses, and give Assange formal guarantees against extradition to the United States.

But as everybody who has studied Reinfeldt knows, this is hardly something that’s going to happen. That doesn’t change the fact that the ball (or, in any case, one of the many balls in this mess) lies squarely with the Swedish Cabinet.

This article was originally published in Swedish on Nyheter24, titled “Ditch the Prestige, Reinfeldt!”. Translated into English by Rick Falkvinge.

After Extravagant “Bond” Party Uncovered, Swedish Govt Classifies ALL Security Police Expenditures

Corruption: Following in the footsteps of a scandal where the Swedish Security Police Säpo was discovered to have wasted half a million taxpayer euros on a James-Bond-themed internal party, the government has classified all economic records of the Säpo – down to the coffee change jars.

The Swedish Security Police, Säpo, doesn’t exactly have a stellar record in the eyes of the public. From having been called “Sweden’s most incompetent organization”, via failing to protect the prime minister and minister of foreign affairs both from being murdered, to being indicted for serious violation of constitutional privacy safeguards recently – but where they were found to be too incompetent to even stand trial (!!!) – they’ve now been caught with the hand in the cookie jar spending half a million euros of taxpayer money playing James Bond.

When Sweden’s largest daily, the Dagens Nyheter, requested the result sheets of the Säpo for 2010 and 2011 to investigate further, the Minister of Justice responded by classifying all economic records of the organization, down to and including petty change spent on coffee, as secret due to “national security”.

(A result sheet is a bookkeeping document that lists the sums of all expenditures per type: how much was spent on taxi, air travel, phone calls, phone taps, and so on. It is issued as part of the closing of the books for a fiscal year.)

This is remarkable for four reasons.

First, an organization whose reputation is so tarnished – no, shredded – as the Swedish Säpo needs a metric ton of strong sunlight to restore its reputation, even if it means that you would find more and more and more dirt from where we stand today. Eventually, the strong light won’t find any more dirt, and at that point, the healing process begins – even if the way to that point can be painful (and probably will be). An organization with as much state-sanctioned violence at its disposal as the security police must always and continuously be held to scrutiny and accountability.

Second, Sweden has a history of priding itself on being default transparent. The Mitt Romney kerfuffle, where people nagged him to release his tax return forms, could never have happened in Sweden: there, everybody’s tax forms are public, so if somebody’s running for office, anybody and everybody can request their current and historic income records from the Tax Authority to check for conflicts of interest.

Any document written by, or received at, any authority in Sweden becomes a public document. It needs to be explicitly classified as secret, and for good reason (on paper), to be taken out of the accountability-holding pool. (You may recall how this was used in the early 1990s by Zenon Panoussis et al to make the ridiculous Scientology Papers public – he just mailed them to Swedish Parliament.)

Sweden has fought for this principle in the European Union, which is generally default opaque, and where eurocrats would generally like Sweden to import the principle of a political, unaccountable nobility.

Third, this shows a routine carelessness with classifying documents as secret that obviously can’t be sensitive to national security. While there may be contemporarily valid reasons to classify parts of the Säpo result sheet, the total cost of coffee obviously can’t be sensitive. To see Sweden’s minister of Justice defend this secrecy comes across as political-nobility arrogant.

Fourth, this is an obvious attempt to escape accountability (and culpability) by the Säpo which doesn’t look good at all, on top of an already-shredded reputation. Oldmedia, newmedia and everyday citizens have more than a right to hold their elected leaders and authorities accountable; they have a duty to do so.

Classifying careless and extravagant party expenditures on the taxpayer’s cent as sensitive to national security is not worthy of a transparent, accountable government.

Saving The Euro In Four Easy, Unaccountable Steps

Reflections: With four simple actions, the Euro can be temporarily saved. There’s not even a political decision involved; all of these four actions can be taken by the executive European branch and its agencies without involving accountable politicians.

At the introduction of the Euro, The United States protested loudly at the existence at a 500-euro bill, as it facilitated the transfer of large amounts of cash in physical form for illicit activities. At this level, however, the concern is not the illicit activities as such, but the economic dominance that the use of currency brings. For the infamous “ordinary people”, the law certainly matters, but at this level, what’s legal or illegal trade can be changed at the stroke of a pen – so what really matters is the neverending game of geopolitical dominance.

So most notably, the 500-euro bill meant that a briefcase packed with euros could transfer a lot more value than a briefcase packed with dollars (the 100-dollar bill).

Because of this, the 500-euro bill meant a threat to displace the US Dollar as the currency of choice for the world’s two largest markets – guns and drugs. (Oil is third.) This didn’t happen, but if it did, it would be a serious prop-up to the weak Euro at the cost of the preciously-failing US Dollar. It would not be a rescue package for underlying structural problems, but it would be a reprieve and breathing space to fix those real problems.

So, four things:

1. Issue a 1,000-euro note.

Issuing a 1,000-euro bill means that a briefcase maxed out with euros becomes worth about 15x as much as a briefcase maxed out with US Dollars.

If the 500-euro note didn’t have the effect of displacing the US Dollar on the illicit markets, which the US feared (and protested against), then maybe the 1,000-euro note will. But we’re not done yet:

2. Issue a 2,000-euro note.

The euro is built on having 1, 2, and 5 in every order of magnitude. So in order to be consistent with the euro notes and coins as such, we’d also have to issue a 2,000-euro note. As a side effect, of course, the proposition becomes twice as valuable.

You can see where this is going as we start looking at the third step of the four:

3. Issue a 5,000-euro note.

So the final new note, obviously, would be the 5,000-euro note.

It is very important to note that issuing these new notes would not mean printing more amounts of money as such, like many countries have mistakenly done when they are debt-stricken. It would merely enable more compact transfers of value, more physically compact transfers of value, when this currency is used.

More specifically, it provides a 50x value proposition over the US Dollar in the world’s two largest markets that make up about 10% of the world’s trade, or about seven trillion euros yearly.

4. Continue ignoring the stability pact.

The eurozone has a budget deficit limit known as the stability pact, which says that no country may have a budget deficit above 3% or a debt above 60% of GDP. (In comparison, the USA has a yearly deficit running at about 50%.)

For the prospect of having an external party buy seven trillion of your currency, you need a deficit of a similar size that they can absorb by buying your currency. The stability pact just won’t allow this (and it is one of the major hurdles to the euro replacing the USD as the world’s reserve currency). While issuing new notes as such doesn’t mean creating such a deficit, enabling other people to buy your currency means that you must have currency for sale.

However, with most member states being in flagrant violation of the stability pact already, this should not be too much of an administrative problem. It is already widely ignored.

It could be noted that in order to survive an economic meltdown, you need to make sure you’re not the weakest economy. It’s kind of like being a zebra in a herd running from lions: you don’t need to be the fastest zebra, or even an average zebra – you just need to not be the very slowest one.

Enabling illicit markets to buy seven trillion worth of euros to displace the USD in order to make their financial transactions 50x more cost-efficient would, obviously, also put an equivalent seven trillion USD for sale on the currency markets. This is something that even China has religiously avoided (it prefers trading its USD for factories and mines abroad, rather than selling it on the market, to get rid of toxic USD assets). The results could be… interesting, seeing that the USA is already dependent on finding debt buyers for 1.5 trillion of USD deficit per year. If that doesn’t happen, the federal administration can’t pay its bills.

As a final note, it should be noted that I’m not advocating this solution. I am pointing it out as something that can be done – in terms of a possible chess move on the geopolitical chess board, if you like. The solution I would prefer to advocate would be much more far-reaching and would involve nasties such as transparency and accountability for authorities and politicians, though if these had been properly applied, we would not have had the euro in the first place.

But above all, many people seem to think that the same rules apply to the economic leaders as to everybody else. This article is an example of the thinking that happens in the geopolitical game; it is a completely different set of rules.

To be honest, though, just issuing new bills and continuing to ignore the stability pact is probably better than setting up several metric fucktons of currency emergency funds to save capsized economies – in about the same way it is better than beating yourself over the head with the nearest hammer.

A Better Definition Of “Non-Commercial”

Reflections: There is an ongoing discussion about the next generation of Creative Commons licenses, and the “Non-commercial” licenses may be dropped – the licenses that allow you to publish something for free distribution provided you don’t make money distributing it.

This is a bit of an odd animal. As Nina Paley has succinctly pointed out, this has no equivalent at all in the Free Software movement – whether you make money or not is irrelevant to the GNU General Public License of free software, which has been an enabler for a large group of entrepreneurs. Most of the discussion around  the distinction of “non-commercial” seems to stem from Larry Lessig’s argumentation in his book Free Culture.

At the same time, there is a considerable gray area in what is considered non-commercial, and as I have previously argued, any gray area at all – any kind of conditional safe harbor – will mean that the copyright industry will gradually turn white to black and legal to illegal through a series of precedent-setting lawsuits – simply because, first, it is their job to keep jabbing at any gray area and change the expected outcomes, and second, there is no risk whatsoever associated with filing phony lawsuits until one of them magically succeeds. A recent TorrentFreak column suggests the same thing as I have argued – that stealing, or attempting to steal, from the public domain (in which case it really is stealing) should be criminal, and that the normal copyright monopoly penalties should also be applied to anybody falsely asserting such a monopoly.

I make two observations here. The first is that our efforts in the Pirate Party has long been articulated as pushing the copyright monopoly out of honest people’s bedrooms, back into the negotiation rooms of the publishing houses, where it should only concern their lawyers. At the same time, this has been mixed up and blended with the Lessig argumentation of “non-commercial” activitiy, and considered to be the same thing.

But it isn’t the same thing. Not by a long shot. The first distinction above is a who, the second distinction is a what. A distinction based on who needs to abide by the copyright monopoly rules can be black and white, leaving out any gray area for jabbing at, whereas a distinction based on the type of activity will invariably slide towards black and illegal across the entire spectrum as the lawsuits start coming.

The second observation is that the non-commercial license, which may not be exactly parallel in thinking to the Free Software concept, still has significant support and enables publications for free distribution – publications that otherwise wouldn’t be published and freely distributable without a profit motive. Speaking pragmatically, I argue and sense that the public opinion, when it comes to the copyright monopoly, is still very rooted in the idea of “right to make money”, and that the step of aligning free culture with free software – while logical – is just too soon without the support of public opinion.

The consistently brilliant Crosbie Fitch has long pointed out this inconsistency, and has argued for a different definition of “non-commercial”, one that I believe solves all of these problems. By defining “commercial use” as “use by a legal entity that is neither a natural person nor a non-profit organization”, you define the term in a clear black and white in a heartbeat, and make it only apply to large corporations. True, you would let people sell small-scale print runs out of their trunk if they could, but that’s not anywhere near the large-scale ripoffs we wanted to prevent when we talked about pushing the copyright monopoly back to the lawyer rooms in large, marble-floored publishing houses. You’d let people share and distribute freely as long as they didn’t do it in the capacity of being employed by a limited-liability corporation or a government – which was exactly what we were after, and this short phrase captures, defines, and divides commercial and noncommercial beautifully. I argue that it is the best definition I’ve seen so far.

True, you would put governmental agencies in the “commercial” arena by this definition. But don’t we want to incentivize them to switch to truly unburdened culture, knowledge, and tools? Their budgets is one of their best incentives to make that happen, so I argue that defining governments and governmental agencies as “commercial” is a desired effect of the definition rather than an undesired side effect.

Trusting Telcos With Internet Is Like Trusting Fox With Henhouse

: It is absolute madness from a policy perspective to trust internet rollout to telco companies. Telcos have a strategic special-interest incentive to delay, hinder, and obstruct any public-interest bandwidth improvements, as ubiquitous, accessible, and economy-boosting bandwidth will shatter their legacy investments.

Around the turn of the century, people in Sweden were laughing heartily at discussions in the United States about whether to connect to the internet using “ADSL or Cable”. It seemed most people were either connected through their phone company or their cable TV provider. To people in Sweden, this seemed mind-bogglingly odd: in the small Scandinavian country, private entrepreneurs had been fibering apartment blocks wholesale for years. I had fiber in my own apartment in 1999, and keep enjoying a 100 megabit-connection with several static, public IPs – from where you’re reading this article, as I run my server from home.

For the record, I should add that it is uncapped, unmetered, and bidirectional. This was a given in 1999, and it should have remained a given, but haven’t, for reasons I’ll get to.

People laughed good at how rapidly things were changing. Placing a phonecall seemed downright anachronistic – why were you paying half a euro by the minute for a nine-kay-six connection that could only be used for a voice application, when you had 100 general-purpose megabits – more than 10,000 times the bandwidth of the 9k6 voicecall – uncapped and unmetered in the wall for a fixed monthly fee? The telcos were doomed to die, the telco business was so utterly doomed to die. The only reason we’d still be making phone calls over the telco network in the short term future was as part of an expected phase-out to something that used the internet instead.

Then, just after the turn of the century, disaster struck the Internet, at least from a public policy standpoint if you want to promote growth and innovation. All the small ISPs were bought out by giant telecoms companies. All of a sudden, if you wanted Internet connectivity, you could only buy it from the old pre-deregulation national telco monopolies: Telenor, TDC, TeliaSonera, KPN, Telefónica.

At that point, the growth in household bandwidth flatlined. Whereas all other IT capacities – storage, computing power, screen sizes – skyrocketed, the growth of household bandwidth just stopped dead and died.

About as predictable as a grandfather clock, really. After, all it made sense: these businesses were about to die from a disruptive upstart, so they pulled a Red Flag, pretended to embrace the Internet, whereas in reality, they are trying to prevent its growth and public utility for as long as possible. The net will disintegrate the telco business (and the cable TV business), and they know it.

It’s not just concrete hinders such as capping, application-level filtering, and metering that the telcos are raising to prevent the net’s utility potential – more than anything, it is the lack of investments in ubiquitous, cheap bandwidth that hinders our economy’s growth; investments that the telcos will never make, proven by the decade-long bandwidth flatline in the graph linked above.

In 1999, Sweden was #3 in household bandwidth as measured by upload, only behind juggernauts Japan and South Korea. Sweden has now fallen to #18, eclipsed by Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan… but also by Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, and Moldavia (!). Overall, the European countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain seem to be leapfrogging the telco-encumbered Western countries.

Creating policy on the pretext that telcos will invest and research in internet bandwidth improvements is policy madness. You could just as well have made policy in the car’s infancy with the assumption that buggy-whip makers would make investments and research on automobile engines. It just won’t happen. It goes against every bit of business sense and strategic interest. What will happen instead is that the obsolete industry tasked with researching their replacement will happily accept any policymaking favors and tax money, do nothing (or even be counterproductive), and then ask for more favors.

You could also look at the Wi-Max fiasco for a very sad story on the topic, if you like. Wi-Max was basically “Wi-Fi for the cities”. It was a long-range wi-fi network designed to outcompete 3G and wireless data for city-wide coverage in terms of cost-effectiveness, reach, and deployment speed. Then, disaster struck as the telcos managed to politically place the Wi-Max frequencies in telco-controlled spectrum space. Predictably, again like a grandfather clock, the standard and the hopes it brought died instantly. We could already have had city-wide unmetered, uncapped, loginless data coverage – but it is just not in the telco operators’ interest. Of course it isn’t. But it is in the public interest. It is in everybody else’s interest.

Techdirt highlights a recent article where the telco lobby is rising its voice in demanding control of the net, in an article titled “EU Telcos: Give us more taxpayer money, and no one’s internet gets hurt”.

So, if you shouldn’t base the internet rollout on telcos (and you absolutely shouldn’t!), what’s the alternative? Saying that something is bad is not enough, you also need something to replace the bad with.

I would argue that energy companies are a significantly better public partner for rolling out the Internet (to give a tangible example of a better option). They are built for decentralization and resilience, not for centralization and control; they are built for five-nines delivery quality, they are built as long-term investments to wire households, and most importantly, they don’t have any existing cash cows that will be killed by the net, so it is not against their strategic interest. This week, until September 24, such a paper modeling a future Internet on the Icelandic energy grid is out for comments. You can access the paper, Islands of Resilience, here.

Oh, and as a final note, my 100-megabit network in my apartment – the network through which you’re reading this very article – is indeed delivered by my local energy company. Unlike telcos and cable, they don’t have any existing cash cows that will be killed off by the internet, and therefore, have no strategic incentive to delay or hinder it. Tell me – do you know anybody connected through a telco company that is running their server from their home? No? None? Not one?

I wonder how many home offices and small entrepreneurs that never took off because they couldn’t start small-scale from their homes, and so, how much damage the telco buyout of the EU Internet has already done to the European economy as a whole?

Dutch Pirate Party Triples Support, But Misses Parliament

Pirate Parties: In elections this week, the Dutch Pirate Party failed to enter Parliament. However, the party still pulled off a tremendous feat in tripling its vote count across the country.

As the votes have been counted in the Netherlands from the September 12 elections, it is clear that the Dutch Piratenpartij got 0.33% of the votes. This is not enough for a seat, but it is a tripling from the last result of 0.11%.

Tripling support at that level, going from some 10,000 votes to some 30,000 votes, is an extraordinary feat. It is the hardest passage to pass as a new party: the normal “tripling” of support happens when going from 1 to 3 supporters, or possibly from 2 to 6. At the tens-of-thousands level, I would argue that this particular growth phase is the most difficult, as it’s just below the critical mass for public awareness and yet the largest necessary growth in absolute numbers.

The Dutch political system has long meant that the Dutch Piratenpartij is a dark horse in the race for the first national parliamentary pirate seat. Its political system is one that favors dark horses and political challengers. Unlike Sweden, where you need 4% of the national vote to take a single seat, or Germany, where you need 5%, there is no such barrier in the Netherlands. The first parliamentary seat is awarded at about two-thirds of a percent of the national vote.

However, it is not all that simple. Challenger parties with a real shot on Parliament get tremendous amounts of media spotlights in countries like Sweden and Germany, judging from the pirate breakthroughs there. In the Netherlands, however, the people are so used to small parties in parliament with just one or a handful of seats, that seeing a new challenger poll at parliamentary levels barely produces a newsblip at all. Therefore, the Dutch Piratenpartij had no significant help from the media spotlights in achieving this feat, but had to pull their own weight entirely in tripling to 0.33%.

And let’s not forget that the same rules apply in the Netherlands as in all other countries – the same instant you start taking votes in a measureable amount over the old-guard politicians’ running the copyright industry’s and the big brother industry’s errands, policy starts shifting towards a better direction. There’s absolutely nothing that gets politicians’ attention faster than the prospect of kicking them out of office.

Based on this trajectory, the Dutch Piratenpartij gets in, come their next election. Then again, so does the German Piratenpartei. Race on.